FL 204 – We help Lea focus on customer-centric strategies to grow her online business

Joining us this week is the proprietress of MomKnowsCollege.com, Flip Your Life community member, Lea Saccoman.

Lea is very passionate in serving her membership community.

She leads and supports moms of high schoolers who need help with the college planning process. This includes a Facebook group where she coaches them directly, answering questions as to what they should know and what they should be doing to get their kid into college. She also has training videos, tools and other resources that are useful for planning and organizing each step in the process.

Having done all that, she now wonders what her next focus should be, how to tie it all together and grow her online business.

In this episode, we’ll help Lea prioritize tasks that are critical to her membership’s success and conquer those self-sabotaging mindset hurdles.

Tune in to get that push you need to move yourself and your online business forward!

Success Story of the Week:

Today’s Success Story is from Carolyn Lincoln.

Carolyn writes,

“My Beta launch ended at midnight with not one membership as I’d hoped, but seven. As I put in a redirect to send people to a waiting list, another slipped in making it eight members. Yay! So now the work really begins to make and keep them happy. I have a call set up for today at 1:00 and I have more plans to. I hope to do a bigger launch for the membership in the fall after getting it organized and more success stories, too.”

Carolyn has been working on her membership site for a little while now, and she has done great work and is bringing people in to figure out what they want, solve problems for them, and make this available to lots more people.

We are super proud of you for those eight members and we cannot wait to see what you do moving forward!

We would love to help you write the success story for your online business.

At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.

Can’t Miss Moment:

One of the things that we have done recently in our community is we have appointed people to become moderators because Shane and I are having a hard time keeping up with all the post ourselves. We still do comment on a lot of them, but we knew that it was time to start bringing in some help.

One of the things that we do is we look for people who are especially active in the community, and also regularly posting success stories, and we appoint them to be moderators of the community.

There are many benefits to being a moderator. One benefit is that we have a private Facebook group for moderators only. Another benefit is that we do a quarterly success call or a quarterly Q&A with moderators only, which means that not only do you get to talk us like we do for all of our members twice a month, but you also get a greater opportunity of having all of your questions answered because there are fewer people there.

Finally, my favorite benefit is the live event in Nashville in September. We still do have a few tickets available at flippedlifestyle.com/Nashville and we would love to have you there. We’re having a special moderator-only get together on the first night just to say thank you to our moderators and to give us a little extra time to hang out with them and get to know them a little bit better.

If you’re interested in becoming a moderator, you can contact our support team and if you’re interested in going to Nashville, we would love to have you, flippedlifestyle.com/Nashville.

Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!

You can connect with S&J on social media too!

Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!

If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!

Can’t listen to the podcast right now? Check out the transcript below.

Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Lea take her college planning business to the next level.

Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.

We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.

What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We are super excited because this is our favorite kind of guest — it is a guest that we have met in person. We have actually had dinner with our guest and her husband, and it was just one of the best experiences we’ve ever had.

Welcome to the show, Lea Saccoman!

Lea: Thank you so much. It was a great experience for us, too. We’re so glad you guys made it out here.

Shane: I still dream about the food that we ate in that Mexican-ish type restaurant. It was so good!

Lea: Yes. It’s one of our favorites here.

Shane: What was it called? What was that restaurant called?

Lea: Barbacoa.

Shane: Alright, Barbacoa. If you’re ever in Boise, Idaho, I don’t know why you’d be in Boise, Idaho, but if you go to Boise, Idaho, you got to find Lea, and you got to go to Barbacoa.

Jocelyn: It is a beautiful place!

Lea: Exactly! Yeah. It’s a really great place.

Jocelyn: Oh, we loved our time in Boise. It was really awesome. Aside from getting sick, but anyway–

Shane: Long story. Had the flu. They almost wouldn’t let us go on the airplane.

Jocelyn: A little later.

Lea: I didn’t give it to you.

Shane: It wasn’t Lea. It’s not Lea’s fault.

Jocelyn: And we actually didn’t know we were sick when we were with you. So anyway, that was not a good experience, but Boise in itself was amazing, and we so enjoyed talking to you guys and just meeting up with you, and having dinner with you. So it is really fun to talk to someone that we have met in person. And also you are coming to Nashville, correct?

Lea: That is right. I cannot wait. It’s on my calendar. I look at it every day. Very excited!

Shane: I consider it a trade. We came to you. Now you got to come to us. That’s how it works.

Lea: A hundred percent.

Shane: It’s a one-for-one exchange around here at the Flipped Lifestyle universe.

Lea: Exactly. Yes, can’t wait to go. Joe wishes that he could come, too, but he will be hunting. It’s hunting season. He’s not going to be able to make it, but I’ll be there. It’s my birthday!

Jocelyn: All right, awesome. Yeah, what a great birthday gift. All right. Before we jump into your business, let’s talk a little bit about you, your family, and your background.

Shane: We know all about you. But you’ve got to tell the Flipped Lifestyle listeners out there what’s going on in your world?

Lea: Yeah. I live in Boise with my husband. I’ve got two teenage daughters with me. My senior is actually graduating, and we’re sending her off to college right now, so a little emotional around these parts, a little surreal.

I work at an educational company for my nine-to-five job. I connect parents and tutors for test prep, like SAT and ACT stuff, and academic tutoring support all over the United States. So, I’m working with families everywhere. I do a lot on the corporate side of that, too. Lots of projects and things there. But my online business that I have as well — it’s Mom Knows College, and I work with moms of teenagers to help them get through the college planning process while their kids are in high school. It’s really competitive out there, so many moms just have no clue what to do to help their kids find the right college and to help them get there. So I help them with that.

Shane: That is awesome. You have something like a bridge between your real world job and what you’re trying to do online, right? Like you know this space because you’re behind the scenes in it all the time, and now you’re kind of trying to be the translator for the common person. Most of us only send a couple kids to college if we do that, right? It’s not like you have all this vast experience in sending kids to college because you’ve done it once, but you see literally hundreds of people going through this process and you’re kind of demystifying it for the rest of us.

Lea: Yeah, for sure. Because you know, when they come to us for the SAT prep for example, then they don’t know what to do next. They know they’re supposed to take the test, but they’re like, okay, but now what? There are a million steps to know about that people just don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know, to get into college and what to do with those scores. Do I take the test again? And what about scholarships? Every step in the process, filling out those applications — there’s a lot there.

Shane: From knowing you in the community, you’re very passionate about this subject. I always get that out of you. This is a big deal to you. It’s important. You know that this is a life changing moment, not only in a family’s life, but in that kid’s life. You already get to do it in your real job. Why do you want to take it online? And really the question I want to ask you is like, what do you want? What do you want from an online business? Why do you want to switch to this?

Lea: I have always been very entrepreneurial. My Dad had his own business since I was little and I used to tutor on my own. I used to just have my own thing. I love doing my own thing. I love my job, the nine-to-five that I have right now, but what I know about that is I’m also working toward “not my own dreams,” but my boss’ dreams. So for me, I just have this burning desire at all times to go, to do exactly what I want to do in the way I want to do it, and just take hold of it and make it my own.

That, plus I have two daughters who I want to show that they can do anything that they want to do with their lives, and they don’t need to just go along with somebody else’s plan or what they think they should do for somebody else. I just want them to be happy, and I want them to follow their passions and just attack those, go after them and do good things for themselves. So hopefully I get on all that!

Jocelyn: Yeah, I love that. I think that’s one of the best reasons to start an online business for sure. That’s one of the objectives that we have, is not only to have freedom for ourselves, but especially for our kids to know that there’s an opportunity for them to have freedom as well. So I love that reason.

Shane: Yeah, that’s really cool because a lot of people fall back on the, “I don’t like my job,” because some people don’t like their job, or there’s other reasons. But you like your job. You literally do. But it’s just that, man, what a powerful ‘why’. I want to be a good example for my kids to show them what’s possible. Or you just want to do your thing. You want to do this, but for you, not for them. That’s a powerful reason. And so many people get stuck in, “Well, I’ve got a good job. I really don’t to give it up.”

But that’s not the end game. That’s just the first step. “Oh, you found a job you like, cool. Why not find a job you like and do it for yourself?” And I love how you kind of came to that conclusion.

Lea: Yeah, it’s perfect that way.

Shane: Let me ask you this though. What’s holding you back from doing that, from just going all in, and it’s all your thing and because you have just such a clear direction, you have this passion for being an entrepreneur, but then you’re still in this job. What holds you back from doing it, just going all in?

Lea: Probably, a couple of things. Conceptually, I want to do that and I want to jump both feet in. My paycheck and my regular job– that’s a great incentive to stay there. It’s the paycheck, but it’s also the time, right? So there’s a lot of time that I’m putting into my nine-to-five, that I don’t get back on the other side of things. And our family– we like to travel a lot. We do a lot of that, especially this year since my daughter is leaving, we’re trying to take advantage of every single second that we have with her before she leaves. We’re taking a lot of vacations, so time has been a little bit of an issue.

I’m trying to get as much done in that short amount of time, and WiFi is available at hotels, but a lot of the places that we go to are in the mountains with no WiFi, so I’m limited with as much work that I can do there. There are obstacles, but it’s not something I can’t overcome, and certainly I’m working toward doing that. Those would be the two things: to maintain the lifestyle that we have right now. My paycheck is very important. My nine-to-five, as well, so I got to get more of that rolling in so that I can quit my job like so many of your Flipped Lifestylers have done so far.

Shane: The paycheck is always the problem because we all like where we’re at.

Jocelyn: Well, we might not even like it. You might say, “I don’t really like my job,” but the regularity of a paycheck and knowing what’s going to happen next, that sometimes outweighs our desires to do something else.

Shane: It’s like, “I like my job, I don’t like working for someone else, but I do like having enough money to rent a hotel up in the mountains.” Right? No matter how much money you make online, that will still be there.

Jocelyn and I literally, the month before we quit our jobs, we made as much money in one month as one of us made in a year as teachers. Now, think about that. What if someone walked up to you and gave you your salary in one month? But I’m telling you, we still sat there at the edge of the desk, at the edge of the couch, talking about going in and resigning, almost ready to throw up. Because it’s still that security blanket.

Lea: Totally.

Shane: Like someone’s given me that check. I got to go get this one again.

Lea: Yeah, there’s a lot of comfort in that for sure!

Shane: For sure. I just want to challenge you as we talk about your online business today to not be so shackled to the paycheck, and just look at it and say, “I don’t have to replace this whole thing.” Because I’m telling you, we replaced the whole thing in a month and it was still scary, but what we really wanted was beyond the paycheck. We wanted the time. We wanted the control.

Now we’re like, we would never go back and work for somebody else. We talk about this all the time, like I would mow yards, I would clean windows, do anything than to go back and work for anybody else.

Jocelyn: We met somebody some of y’all might know, Michael O’Neal, and he has a shirt that says, ‘Unemployable’ and basically that’s what it means, is like I can never be somebody’s employee again.

Shane: Never, never again. Anyway, on the other side looking back, I just want to just tell you, it’s always going to be scary. No matter how much you think you’re replacing on your income, and if you can free yourself of that as you build your business, you get to where you really want to be fast.

When I heard what you really wanted, the first thing you said was paycheck, but the thing you spent the most time on was that time with your kids and traveling with your husband. That’s what you really talked about the most.

Lea: Yeah, for sure. Right, and it’s good to vocalize that, too, right? So just hearing you kind of repeat that back to me is a little bit helpful. That’s great!

Shane: Yeah, so when you hear this podcast. You’ll be like, “What am I talking about? I just need to go do this.”

Lea: I know. I know exactly, right!

Jocelyn: And it’s hard. We were reading not too long ago about how basically humans, we want to get back to equilibrium. If something gets out of balance, maybe it’s good or maybe it’s bad, the natural inclination for all people is to get back to that status quo and that’s what makes it hard when you’re trying to do something like this, is that we want to stay where we are. Mentally we don’t, but our subconscious does want to stay where we are.

Shane: And you self-sabotage yourself, is what’s funny.

Lea: Totally.

Shane: It’s why like people will get a million dollars in the lottery and spend it all. It’s not because necessarily they don’t even know they shouldn’t do that, it’s because they freak out. They were comfortable where they were. They had figured out how to survive at that level. They have massive increase, and they just want to get in their minds like, “Oh gosh, I’ve got to get back to that comfortable level because this is freaking me out.” And we find a lot of online entrepreneurs who start making some money online and start doing this.

We have people in the community, and some of you are going to know who I’m talking about here when you’re listening to this podcast. We have people who have already started making more money online than they’re actually making at their full time job, but they still can’t quit. They still won’t quit. They want to hold onto that security and that comfort.

I have a friend named Jason. He was a listener of our podcast, and I met him at a live event and we were talking at this little pre-party before and I said, hey, let’s go have lunch tomorrow. So he said okay. Me and him went to Chipotle, and we were eating and I was like, “Well, what do you do?” And he was like, he had a job, a full-time job doing something. He was making pretty good money, over 50 grand or something, you know, a pretty good job.

He was a sweet man, and he was telling me about his online business and he was like, “Man, you guys really inspired me to start this thing. So I started it and got a podcast, kind of followed your lead, and I did all these things because I realized if you guys could do it I could do it, too. And I did that.” And then I said, “That’s awesome man.” I’m like, “What are you making?” And he goes, “Oh man, you know, I’ll probably do about 400,000 this year.”

I almost fell out of my chair. And I was like, “What?!” He goes, “Yeah, man.” And I go, “Dude, why are you going to the 50-hour a week, $50,000-job when your online business is making $400,000?” And he kind of looked at me, and he just kind of tilted his head and he was like, “I don’t know.” And he was just like stuck there in that moment now. And he actually quit his job. What’s funny is, as soon as he quit his job, everything grew. And I’m not telling you to quit your job before your business can sustain it.

Jocelyn: No, and everyone out there listening, don’t go hand in your resignation if you don’t even have anything going on.

Shane: No, do that! Everyone quit, right now. No….

Jocelyn: That’s not what we’re saying. Okay? Please don’t quit your job, and then come to us and say, “Well, you told me to quit your job, but I don’t have any money.”

Shane: “This did not work, totally failed.” It’s just a mindset issue of, don’t rely on that paycheck as you’re going into it, and you might find yourself in a more free situation faster. Okay, totally off on that tangent. Let’s turn this right back around and see what you need help with right now, Lea, in your business. What’s going on? How can we help you take your next step?

Lea: I think it just leads beautifully into the next because you’ve said self-sabotage. There was a thing that you said, and I don’t know if it’s self-sabotage for me as much as it is psychological paralysis. I have this thing where I don’t know what to focus on, and when I should focus on it. I’ve got a million things stirring in my head. I need to get better at prioritizing processes, just knowing how to do things and taking those steps and just the right kind of focus.

What I mean is, there are lots of things to be done, and it seems like they always have to be done at all times. There’s marketing that really should be consistently done to get new members for my membership site; taking care of them, my members; creating content for my blog and for my members; and then analyzing data and metrics to make the best decisions for going forward. I get lost in what I should be focusing on and when I should be focusing on that.

And so since they all seem to have such a high priority at all times, I just feel really torn as far as which way to go and when. And I look at people like you guys, and you’ve got this beautiful thing where you seem to be doing this all at one time. You’re consistently marketing, you’re consistently checking in with members, you’re sending your emails out, you know what you’re doing on the back end as far as metrics are concerned. And so that’s kind of where I’m stuck. I don’t know how to make everything fit together in a really good way, it just trips me up.

Shane: Well one, it may look like we’ve got everything figured out. I can assure you we don’t!

Jocelyn: I can assure you that is not the truth.

Shane: Right. It’s like this podcast. We’re recording this podcast right now, guys, you guys are listening to this, but I assure you there’s been screw ups. We pause things, go off-air. Our editor makes us sound like we know exactly how to make a podcast, first take, baby, right?

First of all, don’t compare yourself to anybody else. Don’t be confused by all that because that’s just a disaster waiting to happen.

Jocelyn: And we have learned over six years of doing this, that no one has it all together. We have a lot of very high level entrepreneurial friends now.

Shane: Like, multimillionaire. I assure you–

Jocelyn: None of them have it together. So, that should make you feel a little bit better.

Lea: It’s comforting.

Jocelyn: But there are some things that you can do to help get the machine rolling.

Shane: Yup, we’re going back just one step though. I’ve got this new saying that I just kind of developed this lately, is, “Better is better than best.” Because we all compare ourselves and say, “Oh, I want to achieve with Shane and Jocelyn have,” or “I want to achieve what someone else has,” but you just said, “I want to do what all they’re doing.”

We get in our mind that that’s the best or that’s the best practice, but if we compare ourselves to somebody, one, we don’t know if it’s really the best because they might be just totally messing everything up in the back end. Who knows?

Number two, it’s impossible because there’s always going to be somebody better, right? There’s always going to be a best. If you just focus on getting a little better at all this stuff every day, your business will always grow. It’s not trying to do it like we do it or do it like somebody else, or feeling bad about yourself because you’re like, “Man, they figured it out and I cannot put this together.” So then you get depressed and you don’t take action. You get paralyzed. Right? Really, it’s just about Lea being better.

If your promotion is not where you want it, if you just did a Facebook live for two minutes, three times a week, it would be better. You would be promoting better. Try to focus on just being better and not focus on what anyone else is doing and your business was going to be so much better off and your sanity, too.

Jocelyn: And I think the problem with a lot of people is that they look at what everyone else is doing and they think, “Okay, if I can’t do all of these things, I’m going to do none of these things.” And that’s the worst thing that you can do, okay?

Lea: Yes, it is.

Jocelyn: Taking consistent action in maybe two or three areas is better than taking no action in 15 areas.

Shane: Yeah, we actually did this personally, too, lately. Our kids are nine and seven. As everyone knows, nine and seven year olds can’t do anything right. They can’t clean up after themselves. They can’t put their dishes up, the laundry up. They can’t put their toys up. They can’t not fight and kill each other. You know what I mean? It’s like total carnage at all times when you have a 9- and 7-year-old. We were really frustrated probably a couple months ago about parenting in general. We were like, man, we are totally screwing this up.

We talked about it and I was like, what if we could just fix one thing a month? Wouldn’t that be better? I was like, what if our kids just put their laundry in the basket? I don’t care if they spill everything. I don’t care if they leave their food out, I don’t care if they whatever else. What if they just pick their laundry up?

So I took the month of April, and I sat Isaac and Anna down, and I said, “Guys, look, we’re going to get better at something, and it’s just laundry. Every day, we’re going to make a game out of it and we’re going to say, ‘Who can put their laundry in the laundry basket?'” And it was a miracle. They did it! Now, like 99% of the time they’re putting their clothes up.

I caught Isaac yesterday. He had some clothes on the floor in a pile. I said, “Isaac, you left your clothes out, man. That was one of our habits we built.” He goes, “No dad, that’s my laundry corner. I just took those off. I’m going to put them up as I leave the room.”

Jocelyn: So, that’s batching.

Shane: He’s batching!

Lea: He’s in a system. That’s brilliant!

Shane: But he did it on his own accord, but it was just because of the concept of getting better at his laundry. And I was like, “Dude, that’s awesome.” But then last month was putting your dishes up. So we just started stacking and we’re like, “Man, how much better would life be if kids just did their dishes and laundry and didn’t have to worry about that?” And then if we can get toys, well, I’ll take 90 days to fix those three things.

Jocelyn: So as adults, I think that we can implement more than one thing at a time, which is good. But the way that I like to look at it personally is, I like to make lists so when things pop into my head, I get it down somewhere. Usually, I will use like either Asana or Google Keep or Google Drive or something like that.

Shane: And notice, Jocelyn did not call this a to-do list. It’s just lists of stuff that will get done eventually.

Jocelyn: What happened is I learned this through an app, actually. Some of you may have heard me talk about my 2017. I had a very difficult 2017 from an emotional well-being standpoint, and toward the end of the year I decided I had to do something because I was physically falling apart because of all of this problem.

Shane: Outside looking in on this: it was because Jocelyn was trying to do everything at the highest level possible. She felt every task from keeping the house straight to educating the children, to running the business — she thought everything had to be done at an equal level, priority-wise.

Jocelyn: To make a long story short, I was not doing well. I decided that I had to change something. I had tried physical therapy. I’ve tried dry needling. I had tried chiropractic. I tried pretty much everything physically, and it wasn’t working and so finally it hit me, “Oh, this must be a mental issue.” I ended up getting some different types of tools to help me, but one of the things that I did is I got this app called Headspace.

It’s like a meditation app, and one of the things that I learned in the meditation app is that the human brain, the way that it works is that if you acknowledge something, your brain thinks that you’ve accomplished it even if you haven’t accomplished it. So even by just acknowledging something, it makes you feel like you’ve done something.

So what I have started doing since I have realized that is, I will put things on a list. If I think of anything I put on a list and that way, it’s just partitioned out of my mind. I don’t have to think about it all the time because I know it’s on the list. Then I just go through and I think, “Okay, what are things that I have to do?” All right, things that I have to do are things like paying bills. You have to pay employees if you have employees, you have to answer customer service if you have customers, I would recommend answering your customer service messages. And there are some other things that you have to do, like create content.

But when you get to stuff like that, there are systems that you can do to create it. For instance, if you write blog posts, you can batch those up. Maybe write five or six weeks’ worth so that you can focus on other things like marketing. You had to find a way to prioritize, “Okay, is this going to bring me in new customers? Is this going to keep my existing customers happy?” So that’s a prioritization system that we use.

Shane: Let’s go back to the list really quick, why this is important. When Jocelyn puts these things out of her brain, she knows that all of them are not going to be done. That’s the power of writing down the list. I do this on paper with pencil, and I just write everything that’s on my brain and then I throw the list away. I just write it all down, throw it away, and I’m like, “Okay, now what were the two things that I remember first that I just wrote down?” Bam! That’s probably my instincts telling me what to do.

Normally you can look at your to-do list, and if you’re really honest with yourself, if you’re like, okay, I’m going to look away from the list and look back to it, and the first thing I’m drawn to, that’s probably what I need to do.

Jocelyn: I just thought of something that I know that women will probably understand. This is like a gender stereotype. Sorry, but okay. So think of it this way. If you look around your house right now, I mean, I’m going to look around my house. I see a lot of things that need to be done. I mean, we’re sitting next to a big floor length mirror right now and it’s got a bunch of junk behind it that needs to be cleaned out. I need to clean out my closet. I’ve got a ton of clothes in there that I don’t even think about wearing, and I need to get rid of.

I look at my baseboards, they’re dusty. My blinds, they’re dusty. My windows have fingerprints on them from my children and nose prints from my dogs, things like that. My curtains, they probably need to be dusted, and possibly washed and things like that. Our deck outside looks crazy because it has dog footprints all over it. Okay. As women, as moms, a lot of times we look around and we see all these things.

But think about what happens when somebody comes to your house, so if somebody calls you and says, “Hey, I’m going to stop by.” Do I worry about the blinds? Do I worry about the windows? Do I worry about the baseboards? Do I worry about all this junk behind this mirror? No, I’m worried about, “Is the bathroom clean and is the kitchen clean?” That’s what I’m worried about.

Shane: Are the first two rooms they see clean, and can they go pee? That’s pretty much where we’re going.

Jocelyn: Where I’m going with this is it’s the same thing with your business, okay. It’s like when I look at our business, I see, “Okay, we could do a better job on SEO. We could do a better job on optimizing this page. We could do a better job of engaging our customers. We could do a better job of contacting our customers. We could do a better job of marketing to people.” We can maybe do this, we can maybe do that. But what is the most important thing? When somebody calls me and tells me they’re coming over, what am I going to do first?

Shane: If you really think about your business that way, like it’s really easy. I know exactly what ours is. We’re going to do our podcast and we’re going to email our list every day, and then we’re going to go in the forums and serve our community. If we do those three things, our business runs, we win. Everything else becomes gravy. That’s like running up the score at that point.

Jocelyn: This is hard for me because I’m an optimizer. I like for things to be optimized. I like for, when I open my cabinets for everything to be labeled, but that’s not always possible. So, I have to think what is the most important, what can I not live without? And that’s what you have to start with. Now, eventually you can get to that place where you are going to be able to do more of the things.

Like for instance, in my house example, I’m hiring someone to take all the blinds down, to wash the deck, to clean the baseboard. I’m hiring someone to do all that, and eventually you will get there. But for now, “Is your house going to fall down if those things aren’t done?” No.

Shane: Now, let’s talk about what keeps your house from falling down online, in your online business. There are critical things that you have to do, you just gotta do it. But we want to always go into these tasks with this mindset. Consistency beats proficiency. These don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be the best.

Jocelyn: This is hard for high achievers.

Shane: Yes, there you are.

Jocelyn: I’m a high achiever. I want all of my things to be excellent. This is hard for me, but you have to get past that.

Shane: You have to get past it because consistency is always going to win. Consistency will always beat the people who are trying to be perfect and excellent — every time. When your team gets big enough, you start becoming excellent because other people do it. That’s gravy. Number one is product. Got to have your product offer that people want. If you do not have that done out there and you’re listening to this podcast, you should not focus on anything else but getting a product in. That doesn’t mean a 400-page manual textbook with 75 courses. That means something you can sell. Usually, that means a couple of hours of videos. Okay, so you’ve got a product. We know that. You’ve got a product to sell. Your product’s okay.

The next thing you got to have is a good opt-in strategy. That has to be in place and it has to be consistently done. Usually that workflows like this, you’ve got content that you create regularly that leads to an opt-in, that leads to a sale.

If you’ve already got a product and you’ve already got a lead magnet, then the only thing you should be focusing on there is, “How do I create consistent content?” And I don’t mean once a week. I mean, like, “How do I come up with a plan to come out with three pieces of content a week,” because it’s got to be more consistent. If we’ve got anything figured it out, it’s how to make content. We have a system in place where we can record podcasts. They go to an editor, and they get posted. We are eight, nine weeks ahead at all times in our content strategy because we know without content, your business dies. You’re on a day-to-day basis after your content strategy, your batching strategy, all that’s figured out. There’s really only like four things you should focus on, okay?

The first one is how do I get new customers today? You just got to answer that question. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Our answer to that question is, “Shane emails the list everyday.” That’s what I do. I get up every morning and I email the list. If you’re on our email list, you’re going to get an email from us every single day. It’s going to be extremely valuable content, and yes, I’m going to try to get you to join our membership. So, everybody listening to this podcast, go join our email list, and I will you every day.

That’s your first thing you got to answer is how am I going to get new customers today? That might be different for you. It might be Facebook live. You might do a YouTube live, you might do a webinar every other day, whatever. It doesn’t matter. You’ve got to answer that question every day because, without new customers, your business dies.

The second thing that we ask ourselves every day is how do we keep our current customers happy? You’ve got to answer that for your business. Jocelyn handles retention. Jocelyn, tell her what you were doing yesterday with Bonjoro.

Jocelyn: Yesterday, I was sitting in the back porch. I was burning DVD’s for my kids’ school because I had to do that–

Shane: She volunteered against my judgment.

Jocelyn: Yes, but while I was doing that, in between putting DVDs in the DVD burner, I was making videos for our new members. That’s something that I’m doing now. For every new member, I write their name on a whiteboard and I hold it up and it says, “Welcome, Lea,” for instance, and I make them a little video that says, “Hey, we’re really happy to have you,” and I tell them a little bit about the things available in the community. That is something that has become important for me to do. I want to make sure that people feel welcome when they join. That’s something that I had been doing.

Shane: That’s the question she’s answering though. It’s not about just doing that tactic. Tactics don’t matter, right? Everyone wants the magic subject line. It’s strategies and principles that grow your business, not tactics. The strategy there is, think about how I’m going to make my current customers happy because imagine if your business ran like this, Lea. Let’s say you’ve got two hours a day to work on your business. Let me ask you, if this would grow your business: if every day you spent 30 minutes of that two hours writing a blog post, and you spend another 30 minutes doing a Facebook live for your following, and if you spent another 30 minutes emailing your list to promote your membership, then you spent your last 30 minutes serving your members, would your business grow if you did just those four things? It would, It just would. If that’s the only thing you did, was get your content in order, found new members and serve your customers, everyone would grow. We overcomplicate it so much!

Jocelyn: Are there other things that you could do? Yeah, there are other things that we could do. There are probably people out there listening to this podcast right now saying, “Well, I wonder why they don’t do this,” or, “I wonder why they don’t do whatever.” Well, the reason we don’t is because there’s something else that has a higher priority right now, and we’re taking action on that.

Shane: Until those things are done, we’re not doing anything. Until we find new customers, serve new people, or serve our current people, we’re not doing anything else.

Jocelyn: Are we running on all cylinders? Are we 100% of what we could be doing? Not yet, but we’re getting there.

Shane: But it gets better every day and that’s the goal, right? That’s the goal.

Lea: Beautiful.

Shane: Okay, so we just talked about consistency during those two things. We have two more things on our priority list every day, but those two things get done first.

The next thing that we look at is promotion. This is what you talked about earlier with marketing and stuff like you feel like you should always be doing it. We even overcomplicate marketing.

Let’s say you did that consistent thing I just said, those two hours of work, you did that Monday through Thursday. Friday, take the day off of those things, and set up some promotion for the next week. Just start an ad and let it run next week. There, you’re promoting. You just have to work in a time to do promotion, but promotion is very automated in these days, and your content strategy is promotion because every time you write a new blog post, Google puts new people on your website, so that is promotion.

Lea: Yes, Yeah.

Shane: But yeah, you do have to take a day to make some ads or do something to get a little fuel on the fire to do that.

Jocelyn: To make this very long story short, stop thinking about it so much and get it done.

Shane: Yeah, yeah.

Lea: I love it! That simplifies things for me.

Shane: This totally works. This is another thing that people get really confused about because they’re like, “Well, I have to spend four hours a day on this than the other–” No, let’s just say you have 30 minutes, because sometimes we only have 30 minutes.

This morning… I usually spend about an hour on my email every day because I really want to think of how I can best help people, so I think about all the questions that we’ve been sent lately, and I really want to write a really good email, make sure that I’m inspiring people to take action.

But sometimes I don’t have time. This morning I only had 15 minutes before our first podcast interview, because we’re batching today — podcasts. I had 15 minutes to sit down and write that email. Right? I had to get it done. There’s going to be times you’re going to look at your calendar and you’re going to go, “Man, I’ve only got 30 minutes today to do this.”

Well, guess what? You could still do a five minute Facebook live. There’s your content, right? You could still send a five-minute email that just says, “Hey guys, I am so pressed for time today. I would love to hear what you’re struggling with. Shoot me a question back and I’ll get to it later!” That’s a two-minute email. So you’ve promoted.

Jocelyn: But you did something.

Shane: Yeah, you’ve done something. And then your customers– all alright, I don’t have time to get in my forums today, and answer every question. But I could go start a forum discussion post, and read it tomorrow. Now, you’re engaging your community, you’re keeping your customers happy, you’re spurring conversation. Then let’s say that you don’t have time to set up an ad. Well, boost the Facebook live you did earlier. Takes five seconds. You just hit 20 minutes, and you did all the things you need to do in your business and you got better. You got one step closer to growing.

Jocelyn: And it may be that you need to get an accountability partner like Shane and I do this for each other. There was one day, like a couple weeks ago, he’s like, “I don’t think I’m going to write an email today.” And I’m like, “Yes, you are. You have to write the email.”

Shane: I have to do the email.

Lea: Yes, oh, that’s fantastic.

Shane: The most important accountability partner you have is your customers. I have consequences with Jocelyn because she’s my wife and I live with her.

Jocelyn: That’s right. I’m pretty mean.

Shane: I have other accountability partners and sometimes I blow them off because they might get mad at me, but I don’t have real consequences. But our customers, we do, because our customers need us. They need our help. They need us to help them solve their problems. We just got a message yesterday from Sandra Chen. Some of you might remember her from an earlier podcast. She was the mother who got pregnant, had a baby and came down with breast cancer. She was in the hospital battling breast cancer, raising a newborn baby, and working on her online business and she built a passive income business, basically from her hospital bed.

I checked on her the other day. I just sent her a message, and said, “Hey, we’ve been thinking about you. Just seeing how the treatments are going, and what’s going on with that.” And she wrote me this amazing message back. We were sitting in a restaurant. I started crying because she said that she was really tired and it was just a really big ordeal physically, and all those things were going on with her. But she was really drawing strength from her faith.

Then she said something that I will take this every day of my life to make me work harder: she said, “I have not had the energy to really work on my business, but I’ve still been doing it every day because I’ve just been following you and Jocelyn. When you release a podcast, it gives me strength to release a podcast. When you do a Facebook live, I do a Facebook live right then, because I saw you do it. When I get your email, I write an email.”

And it just really hit me. “Oh my gosh! If I don’t send that email, she doesn’t send an email because she doesn’t have that strength. If I don’t do the Facebook live, that person doesn’t do the Facebook live.” And last night I did a Facebook live at midnight last night because someone wrote me a message like, “What do you do when it’s 11:00 and you’re tired, and you don’t want to work on your business?” I was mad because I was like, “I’ll tell you what I did. We stayed up till one and we worked on our business and we flipped our life.”

I did this big rant. Someone wrote me an email and said, “I got that Facebook live at midnight, and I was going to go to bed because I was tired, but I stayed up and recorded a podcast and built an entire sales funnel.”

Lea:Nice! Yes!

Shane: And yours is the same thing. If I don’t get this next thing out for this person to go to college, that kid may not go to college because that parent won’t figure it out. And that’s your accountability! That’s what says, “No, it’s not that I don’t have time. I’m going to make time because someone out there needs this.” If you do this, you will always find time to do those four things. You will always find the time.

Lea:Yeah. That’s beautiful.

Jocelyn: All right, well I feel like we kind of just knocked down all those objections, right?

Shane: Exactly, right. That just killed everything. That question is destroyed forever.

Lea: This is awesome. Now I have something to act on. This is, and it was very inspiring for me, too, you guys. I so appreciate it. Especially the story, Shane. That’s really great. And now I’ve got a process, and I’ve got steps and I have way to keep it clear in my head.

Shane: We know you, and I’m not letting you off the hook. Okay. You’re not going to be like, “I’m going to take an action step, and now, I got to post it in the forum.” That’s fine. I want a detailed plan. I want to know– what is today? Is today Wednesday? What is today?

Lea: In fact, I am finishing up all of my blog posts and all my email broadcasts through August by tomorrow.

Shane: So we’ve got content covered for the next couple of months then, right?

Lea: Yes.

Shane: Okay. What are you going to do to sell your membership to get new customers? How are you going to do that?

Lea: Gosh, you had mentioned Facebook live. Some of the other members that I talked to do Ask Me Anything type Facebook lives, which is what you guys do, too. That might be a really good thing for me to start doing consistently. I’ve done one Facebook live. I felt like that was successful and then I stopped. That would be a good thing for me, and you guys are motivating me to do that. So that would be something that I would do.

Shane: I want to tell you though, remember you’re not just doing an Ask Me Anything. If you answer three questions, you’re going to pitch your membership after every question. You’re going to have a link in the description because the goal is not to do a Facebook live. The goal is to get a new member.

You got to be like Hansel and Gretel. You gotta leave some breadcrumbs. Every piece of content you do that’s designed to get that member, you’ve got to have a link to your sales page, and you’ve got to call it out and pitch it after every question. What are you going to do to keep your current customers happy?

Lea: I have a Facebook group for them. I am going to dig in where their kids are at right now, what I know of where their kids are at right now, and tag them with some questions and with some value add items. Whether that’s a website they should be looking at or one of my tools in my community and my membership that they should be using right now to get their kids to the next step in the process.

Shane: What you do there is pick one person a day. This is how you manage this, okay? You’re doing this publicly in a Facebook group. Remember, everyone’s going to see it, okay? It’s just like our forums, so pick one person, don’t do a private message. Put it in the forum in the Facebook group and the wall. Say, “Hey, Cindy, you really need to read this. Oh, and anybody else that’s in this situation needs to read it, too.” Now you’ve served your whole community, takes five minutes and not only is Cindy going to be happy, and feel special because you tagged her, but all of your community is going to see that and you’ve served your whole community at once.

Lea: Yes. Great!

Shane: And then what are you going to do every week? We’ll say once a week, to promote your membership using money.

Lea: Well, in fact, I have a webinar that’s almost complete for automation that I’d done live before. I was anticipating putting that up and I’d sell the membership hard on that one. I think running ads to that might be a really good idea. I have to think about it. Now, I feel like I have to plan. I have to really look at each week, and see what would make sense.

Shane: I would recommend just getting up every day and doing the tasks because you will make such good decisions in the moment if you just block the time out.

Jocelyn: But if you only give yourself that much time, then you have to get it done.

Shane: If you get up at 6:00 and you say, 6:30 to seven is finding new customers– and it doesn’t matter when you do a Facebook live, too, by the way, you can do it whenever you got time. It doesn’t matter. Don’t try to find the perfect time for any of this. Just do it. Just go for it. Answer the question, do the Facebook live, send the email and I would challenge you to start that promotion Friday for like 20 bucks a day or 10 bucks a day or whatever.

Don’t look at it until next Friday. Again, just let it go. You’ll know because people will start joining, but yeah, if you do this, don’t even worry about the rest of it. Just do those things for like three months and it’s going to grow. It’s going to happen.

Lea: That’s what I needed.

Jocelyn: Alright, Lea. That was a lot of information, but I think that you are going to crush it. I can’t wait to see what you do with all of this that we’ve just given you.

Shane: Oh, by the way, it’s about three or four months until Nashville, so this is the perfect time to get started.

Lea: A little bit of accountability there, too.

Shane: That’s right. You’ve got to show up. You have to literally sit at a table with us in a couple of months at Flip Your Life live in Nashville and show us what you did.

Lea: Yes, for sure!

Shane: Wouldn’t it be amazing, though to say, “Hey guys, I came in and did this five out of seven days a week, and my business exploded!” And now you’re ready to go to the next level.

Jocelyn: We are expecting that because we know that you can do it.

Lea: Oh brilliant. I love it!

Jocelyn: Alright guys, if you want to check out what Lea has done at Flip Your Life Live Nashville–

Shane: That was so good, Jocelyn, that was such a good transition!

Jocelyn: It was. We have a handful of tickets remaining. I mean very, very few. In fact, by the time that this comes out, there may not even be any remaining. If you want to find out, head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/nashville and we would love to see you there.

Shane: There are only like five tickets left at this point when we recorded this. So you know, a hundred awesome people in the same room, I’m just saying. It’s going to be life-changing!

Lea, we love you. We’re so proud of you with what you’ve already done and we cannot wait to see what you are going to do next. We really just appreciate you letting us hammer down and dive deep into what you’re doing because I know that’s challenging, but it’s even more challenging when you know, thousands of people are going to hear it. Thank you for sharing that with everybody today!

Lea: My pleasure! This is so helpful for me, you guys. I love you, too. I appreciate it so much.

Shane: Alright guys, that wraps up another call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. If you’d like to become a member of our Flip Your Life community head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business as well.

Jocelyn: Alright, next we are going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment, and these are things that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 jobs.

One of the things that we have done recently in our community is we have appointed people to become moderators because Shane and I are having a hard time keeping up with all the post ourselves. We still do comment on a lot of them, but we knew that it was time to start bringing in some help.

One of the things that we do is we look for people who are especially active in the community, and also regularly posting success stories, and we appoint them to be moderators of the community.

There are many benefits to being a moderator. One benefit is that we have a private Facebook group for moderators only. Another benefit is that we do a quarterly success call or a quarterly Q&A with moderators only, which means that not only do you get to talk us like we do for all of our members twice a month, but you also get a greater opportunity of having all of your questions answered because there are fewer people there.

Finally, my favorite benefit is the live event in Nashville in September. We still do have a few tickets available at flippedlifestyle.com/Nashville and we would love to have you there. We’re having a special moderator-only get together on the first night just to say thank you to our moderators and to give us a little extra time to hang out with them and get to know them a little bit better.

If you’re interested in becoming a moderator, you can contact our support team and if you’re interested in going to Nashville, we would love to have you, flippedlifestyle.com/Nashville.

Shane: We love to talk about our Can’t Miss Moment with you guys each week right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, but there is one thing we like to talk about even more, and that is the Success Stories from the members of our Flip Your Life community.

Today’s Success Story is from Carolyn and Carolyn writes, “My Beta launch ended at midnight with not one membership as I’d hoped, but seven. As I put in a redirect to send people to a waiting list, another slipped in making it eight members. Yay! So now the work really begins to make and keep them happy. I have a call set up for today at 1:00 and I have more plans to. I hope to do a bigger launch for the membership in the fall after getting it organized and more success stories, too.”

Way to go, Carolyn, we are so super proud of you. Carolyn has been working on her membership site for a little while now, and she has done great work and is bringing people in to figure out what they want, solve problems for them, and make this available to lots more people. We are super proud of you for those eight members and we cannot wait to see what you do moving forward.

We would love to help you write the success story for your online business at the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community

Shane: Before we sign off today, guys, we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible, so we would like to share some of that with you.

Today’s verse comes from 2 Corinthians 9:8, and the Bible says, “And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”

Take that to heart, get out there and do some good work in your online business, and be blessed. That is all the time that we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We will see you then!